As you watch “The Other Place,” a slick, potently acted drama by Sharr White that opened on Broadway on Thursday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, it may strike you now and then that your mind is playing tricks on you. Facts that seem firmly established in one scene melt into vapor a few scenes later, leaving you with a vague itch to press pause to sort things out, or maybe rewind. Or both.

Don’t worry: the disorientation is not accidental. Mr. White’s aim is to keep us wondering about everything we are told by the play’s protagonist and narrator, a drug-company scientist named Juliana Smithton. (Even her name is the subject of some testy badinage.) And thanks to the superb performance of Laurie Metcalf as Juliana, the less we are sure of, the more we are engaged. Our perceptions of Juliana’s journey through a life upended by trauma may continually shift, but one thing remains fixed: the intense, complicated humanity of Ms. Metcalf’s performance.

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The Other Place Laurie Metcalf and Daniel Stern in Sharr White’s drama, which opened Thursday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

At first it’s hard to imagine a more reliable narrator than the formidable Juliana. As embodied by an actor who naturally exudes an earthbound, no-nonsense intelligence, Juliana seems to define integrity, honesty and authority. Wearing a sleek black skirt, jacket and heels, Juliana addresses us directly in the opening moments of the play, recounting a disturbing episode that took place at a pharmaceutical conference in the Virgin Islands.

Having relinquished research, Juliana is now in the business of promoting a new drug she discovered for the treatment of dementia. Crisply in command of scientific language, she radiates a confidence slightly tinged with aggression. You wouldn’t want to find yourself on the other side of an academic argument with this woman.

But midway through her presentation to a group of medical professionals, she becomes disturbed by a young woman in attendance wearing nothing but a yellow bikini. As the presence of this unsettling auditor begins to obsess Juliana, her concentration vanishes, her mind suddenly freezes up. The presentation, we learn, was abruptly ended. Retreating back home to Boston, Juliana finds herself convinced that she has a brain tumor.

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Ms. Metcalf portrays a drug-company scientist who believes she has a brain tumor.CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

But does she? Juliana’s belief in her self-diagnosis may be fierce and intractable, but she happens to be married to a prominent oncologist, Ian (Daniel Stern), who remains unconvinced and urges her to see another specialist. Unfortunately Juliana doesn’t put much stock in Ian’s advice these days, not since he started cheating on her. And not since he refuses to join her in reaching out to their estranged daughter (Zoe Perry), with whom they have not been in contact for many years, after she ran off and married a onetime colleague of Juliana (John Schiappa).

As scenes from Juliana’s life are enacted before us — often narrated from her point of view — our perspective on her character begins to shift, imperceptibly at first, and ultimately radically. By the end of Mr. White’s taut drama, which clocks in at a speedy 70 minutes, the authority that Juliana wears with as much confidence as she does that trim suit has been stripped away, exposing a woman as fragile as a delicate piece of glass and almost as transparent.

Looked upon with a cynical eye — or, maybe just a critical one — “The Other Place,” first seen Off Broadway in an MCC Theater production before this Manhattan Theater Club restaging, could be dismissed as a more sophisticated, stylishly presented version of lesser cable-television fare, those addictively lurid movies about women imperiled by either a) bad men playing head games, or b) fatal diseases, or c) both. And the play turns on a twist of fate that is far too tidy to be credible.

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Laurie Metcalf and Zoe Perry in a scene from Sharr White’s play, which opened on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.

Still, “The Other Place” is a cunningly constructed entertainment that discloses its nifty twists at intervals that keep us intrigued. In what is shaping up to be a lousy season for new plays on Broadway, perhaps this alone is worth a cheer or two.

Even more worthy of praise is the fine production, nimbly directed by Joe Mantello and featuring excellent supporting performances from Mr. Stern and Ms. Perry (Ms. Metcalf’s real-life daughter). Mr. Stern’s Ian weathers Juliana’s heated attacks on his integrity with a befuddled exasperation that makes us question her assessment of him as a disloyal adulterer. Ms. Perry neatly differentiates all three roles she plays, but is particularly fine as a young woman whose fraught encounter with Juliana at the family beach house on Cape Cod (the “other place” of the title) brings the play to a moving conclusion.

But your attention is not likely to stray from Ms. Metcalf for long. The mystery of her character’s behavior keeps acquiring new layers, and she brings to each new revelation an intensity and precision that transfixes. The efficient businesswoman of the first scene becomes the embittered wife of the next. She in turn melts into the loving mother pleading desperately for her daughter’s attention, eyes bright with hope and fear.

It would be unfair to describe the character’s final transformation, but as rendered by Ms. Metcalf you can rest assured it is entirely convincing, and pretty close to heartbreaking.